- [Narrator] Production funding for Making It Up North is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

(adventurous music) - [Cory] Tree farming, it's just a longer-term farming.

It's a beautiful thing to see.

- [Michael] From a very young age I was very interested in sawmills.

- [Todd] When I buy my lumber rough, the beauty is kind of inside.

(upbeat music) - [Cory] This area we're on, was logged in the 60s.

So, I mean, it's like, within you know, our lifetimes basically, or within a stone's throw of them and it's like, the timbers all here for us to cut again.

So, it's just a longer-term farming.

It's a beautiful thing to see, even though it's a little slower.

For generations in the North shore here in Minnesota, my grandpa loaded the first load of logs at Saba Landing, actually.

So, then my dad ran it and my uncle was a trucker and a couple uncles were trucking.

And, I did some when I was teenager too.

I went to college at UMD for business management and I ended up moving to the twin cities to finish my degree down there.

Worked for Target stores and got my, got into management with them.

And then, my dad called soon after that and said, "I'm getting out of logging."

One of the downturn times when it wasn't going so good and he didn't have a lot of people to help him working.

And so, then I said, "I have to think about that one "for a little bit."

And, surprised him by calling back and saying, "I'd like to come back and help you."

That was 1995.

- We started off, it was just a field.

And we put up this building, which is the sawmill building first.

And then, we went on to that building.

And then finally, the newer building here.

I'm Michael Biron.

I started Lester River Sawmill in Rice Lake Township in Duluth.

My dad did dabble in wood.

We cut down larger hardwood trees in our woods in Southern Minnesota and brought them to a little sawmill.

He'd sell some on the weekend to people that are doing projects like that.

Real small scale, but he did a lot of it and we all involved in it.

From a very young age I was very interested in sawmills.

This is the third sawmill I've had.

My other ones were just small mills in my backyard.

And so, I decided to go into it and invest money and make it a business.

Grade is a real big factor in a sawmill as far as what the value of any given board is.

And that interests me and I'm sure glad it does.

I've done it for many years and I do what's called grade sawing on my sawmill, where you're actually taking your highest grade boards one at a time off of any given log.

- [Cory] The glass economic downturn in 2008 and nine was kind of a big deal, where we had to kind of reassess what we wanted to keep doing.

It was either quit or change up a little bit with the cost of fuel and everything.

And so, we just said, we're gonna do cut to length cutting equipment, which reduces the amount of fuel you're using and the amount of people you have working.

And, stay little lighter footprint for the changes in the market that we were in the midst of.

And, we've known over the many years just is very cyclical.

Goes good when it's good, but it's really not so good at times too.

We're a smaller footprint, then we do specialty, you know, we do a lot of specialty cutting, a lot of firewood and saw bolts and a lot of sorts.

And, we enjoy the interaction with those customers too.

And, you know, some of the bigger logging, it slows you down to have to do some of that.

So, we enjoy that niche that we're in.

- Delivery of Basswood bolts actually, from Cory Holden, by his truck driver Chuck.

And, he'll back in where I want it and I'll scale the wood on the truck to get the most accurate scale of cordage.

And then, we'll have him unload.

- I'm Chuck VanDoren, owner, operator, own my own tractor there and trailer.

I haul for Cory Holden there and keep myself busy doing that.

Between him and another logger, between those two, they keep my life rather busy.

Today, I've already moved in a couple loads over to LP and Two Harbors there.

Now, this one here and it'll be the end of the day after this.

So, yeah, busy slaving away.

I got a load of Basswood on, some really beautiful looking bolts on there that'll get chopped up into boards and which will be made into mainly flooring or siding for somebody's home.

I get up every day still excited to go to work, which is a beautiful thing.

A lot of people don't have that pleasure.

No, it's worked out good.

You know, we've had our stumble years.

I mean, but every economy does in that manner, you know, but overall it's made for a good life and a good living.

You can't ask for more than that.

- So, this is where the logs are loaded on to the log deck.

So, the logs are fed one at a time onto this sawmill carriage and dug down and then are pulled past the saws here by this cable.

They go past what's called a vertical edger.

It's just part of the sawing process.

And then, this is the 48 inch circle saw that I like to run.

Then the board falls off and gets brought out there and those chains just bring the board and dump it on what's called the green chain.

And, that's where I stack it after I've sawed for maybe an hour or less or something.

Just like your chainsaw, if you saw dirty wood, you have to sharpen more often.

So, this is where the wood gets sawed out of the sawmill and comes down and just lays on to this green chain it's called.

Then it's the slab wood and the finished product, the boards that I'm happened to be cutting right now.

And that's kind of the process here in the sawmill end of this thing anyway.

- The support structure that we all need and have to make this all work.

You know, you've got all your mills, sawmills like, Hedstrom Lumber, that's the big one in our area up in Grand Marais.

We haul logs to them.

And, then you've got small mills that take saw bolts, basically 100 inch, or you know, you cut them a little longer for them, so they got some trim.

They like that, but you know, just eight inch and up, hundred inch plus saw bolts and they make paneling and whatever products that they market.

So, we've got a couple of mills in our area that utilizes the saw bolts and then everything else is pulpwood.

Here, we've got some Basswood pulp.

The LP mill in Hayward, which is a long ways away.

Sappi takes a little bit of it too, but those two mills will take Basswood.

So, we're piling it up, waiting to see how much we get of it and decide where it's gonna go.

We don't know yet.

The softwood pulp is the downer right now.

And, apart of when Verso shut down, they shut down their hardwood mill in Wisconsin Rapids, which used all kinds of hardwood mix, which included Birch.

So, that market's not there currently.

And so, you've got about half of your species mixed that you're gonna have a tough time marketing.

Verso was a paper mill, but they're not running now.

And Sappi, obviously paper and textile products.

And then, LP is a siding product that they make out of that mill in Two Harbors here.

So, glad to have them all in place and we need them all, we're kind of short right now, but we need every one of them.

Thankfully, most of what we have is hardwoods that Sappi will use and or for firewood sitting in a fairly decent spot, not too much overhead and otherwise definitely a time of reflection for all the logging community.

- Sawmill can't exist for too long without the loggers and the logger can't exist very long without good markets to get rid of their are several species that they deal with.

My wood is coming from a radius of about a hundred miles from the sawmill.

I suppose I have a core of about 10 loggers now.

I worry about the number of loggers operating going down.

The startup costs and even replacement costs for equipment is so high, it makes it even more difficult to get money and loans and stuff to start up a business, or to keep one going.

It all ties into your markets and just the price they're getting paid for their products.

- [Cory] This location right here, we've got four different cutting blocks on it.

And it's a very mixed cutting with all five or six different species and very many sorts with saw bolts and pulp and logs.

So for us, you know, we're pretty small.

And so, local Finland area, we've got plenty to do with the state and county timber sales.

And so, they'll have auctions twice a year typically and once in the summer and once in the winter.

And then, we'll go, you know, they'll have, they'll put them up, a listing of their areas where there's timber and then you'll talk with them and go out on the site and check it out, see if that's something that you've got market for or ability to do it with the equipment we have and then go to the auctions and bid.

So, that's all that, that's how we attain the timber.

You know, we're in an area where there's lots of sight seeing.

People do drive the back roads and check things out just to get peace and quiet.

A gal came up when I was doing some maintenance on my equipment at the end of the day, at the end of a shift and she was running her dogs down the road and she was very polite and said, "Oh, hello there.

"I don't mean to take up too much of your time, "but why are you ruining everything?"

And, I had to kind of think quick, you know, about how I was going to respond to that.

She was still friendly that it gave me time to keep my composure anyways.

And so, it was a cool thing because I was able to educate, well, I hope I did anyways, to as to why, you know, what was actually happening and why we were doing it and yes, I agree, you know, it isn't the prettiest right at the moment, you know, when you're harvesting, depending on what eyes you have, of course, to see, it looks good when it's all growing nice and you get to drive by it and enjoy it.

But, I was able to share with her just, you know, the reasons why we're harvesting this particular site.

They're thinning some of the hardwoods on it and there's ice damage in some of the trees, so they're sending them out, over mature wood and they're trying to you know, keep it productive and not lose the wood that's standing.

If you don't cut it at all, of course, you know, you're missing out on the economic value of it and sustaining our, you know, our logging portion and the mills that use the product.

And so, the neat part was that I'm able to share with her and I'm kind of advertising our business too.

We're stewards, you know, it's beyond our lifetime.

- My name is Todd Ronning.

My business name is Ronning's Lake Carvings, and we're here at my home and studio in Two Harbors, Minnesota.

I make three-dimensional carvings of lake maps in a variety of domestic hardwoods.

I always say the artistry of my product begins with assembling the wood panel.

It gives me the ultimate opportunity for continuity of color and grain by cutting it all from the same piece of lumber.

When I buy my lumber rough, the beauty is kind of inside.

I take my piece of wood that I'm gonna make my plaque out of and I rip that on the table saw and then I use the jointer and joint that first face on there.

And, that trues up any discrepancy in the lumber that way.

And then, when I plane in the other side parallel, I get a real visual of the inside of that material.

And of course, I'm careful when I assembled my panel that I set it up with the bark on the outside and then the sapwood just inside the bark.

And then, of course, the darker colored Heartwood toward the middle.

And basically, what I end up with then is a glued up panel of wood, but it has the appearance as though it's cut from a single log.

At a young age, I was also fortunate to have some school teachers who introduced me to the BWCA in probably about the sixth grade, which then started a love of maps.

And, I noticed as I was looking at topographical maps, planning out canoe trips, I just started to see an artistry in contour lines and the shapes of lakes.

And, later on in life, I had a light bulb moment one day where I realized that with a handheld router, I could make a pretty decent representation of a lake into a piece of wood with the router.

And so, I made one for a friend as a gift.

This friend saw that and called me and said, "Gee, that was really neat, can you do my lake?"

And pretty soon I had strangers calling me up, asking about this lake or that lake.

And, I was working full time at that time.

After about 10 years of burning the candle at both ends, 20 years ago I quit my day job to do my lake map carvings full time.

Oh, what we've got here is a 20 by 40 inch carving of Lake Vermilion in Tamarack with the bark edge.

Tamarack, it's more on the hardwood category.

It holds itself together really well on some of those very fine details, Island features, and river, and shoreline details.

Quite by accident, in a load of lumber I would find some, a few pieces that had had a little bit of bark on the edge here and there, you know, and I finally said, "You know, maybe I don't need to cut that off and waste it."

All these examples are Birch right here.

I talked with Mike and we started experimenting with cutting the logs specifically to retain those bark edges.

It didn't take too long for Mike to be able to figure out the technique that he needed to do to give me the product that I wanted.

Over the years we've really developed a good relationship as far as him producing exactly what it is I'm looking for.

When I first apply that polyurethane finish on there is when the wood really starts coming to life.

And then, the stain is near the end of the process.

And that really starts to define that lake image.

Every lake has its own distinctive shape.

And, I think most cabin owners and lake lovers recognize that shape of their lake.

And so, that application of a stain really brings that shape of the lake out from the plaque.

And, that's when it really starts coming to life.

- Part of the drive that people have to come to Lester River Sawmill for instance, is they like to support local business.

The big box stores do a really good job of providing products, but sometimes in lumber they find some different uses for my lumber than what they can get at at the big box stores, whether it's full dimension, rough cut lumber for an outside application, where you don't need to kill them, dry it, or plane it, that's one product.

And then, some of the products like my fireplace mantles, where it's a big kill and dry timber, they were very rough.

And so, when a customer comes in and buys it then we plane it down to whatever size they want.

I try to keep a good stock of mantle material around.

Usually a mantle, somebody needs it like right now.

Because I do it myself here, I can watch the quality of my lumber, so people are happy to get maybe a higher quality board.

It seems like that's the feedback I get.

So, we're in the, what I call the main building.

It houses a deal Vonnegut molder and it also houses a 30 inch single surface planer that I use to do finish products on.

I'm kind of low on inventory right now, but these bins, I usually try to keep full.

And, this is what is my stock.

I have the office in this building.

So, this is a real, this is where my customers really come into and we talk about their needs.

- [Cory] My son did help for a time, but he had to live it too, watching dad and mom pray and wonder how things were gonna turn out sometimes.

And so, as much as he enjoys the North land up here and being in the woods and working hard, he could definitely do it, but he got married and they're gonna, he's gonna have a child here just this next month.

And so, life goes on, another generation.

I have to admit, I probably have discouraged him, you know, from it in a way, even though it's a honest job and a necessary job and it's an enjoyable job at times too, it's very cyclical and lots of dependent factors on it, but it's definitely not easy.

But we're still doing it and my dad still helps.

And, we're enjoying our time up here in the North shore still.

Being stewards of the land.

(cheerful music)